This page was called Freedom Hill Journal when I started it in August. My niece changed the name for me last week and I let her. Everything here is typed on a library computer, thirty minutes at a time, so please excuse me if I stop in the middle of a thought. There are people waiting behind me.

Sunday, September 26, 1999

Our church is under water to the windowsills, so this morning we worshiped with Gloria's congregation here in Rocky Mount. They made room for all of us Princeville folks like we were their own. The ushers brought folding chairs down the aisles. A lady I have never met in my life held Mama's hand through the whole service.

The pastor read the Forty-Sixth Psalm. "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear ... though the waters thereof roar and be troubled." When he got to the waters, a sound went through that church that I will not forget. It was not crying exactly. It was a hundred people saying yes without opening their mouths.

After service, out on the steps, the talk was all the same talk. Will the town come back. There are people already saying the government will buy us out and let the river have it. There are people saying they will never live on that low ground again, and I cannot blame them. Some of them are old and tired, and they have earned the right to be.

But I keep thinking about who built that town. Freed people, on the land nobody else wanted, the land that flooded. They knew it flooded. They built anyway, and they chartered it in 1885, the first town in this country incorporated by Black people. My great-grandmother was baptized in that town. My mother was married in it. I taught Sunday school in it for twenty years.

I do not know what we will decide. I know what my great-grandmother would say. She would say the river has been there longer than us, and God has been there longer than the river.

Thursday, September 23, 1999

The water is still up. A week now.

We saw it on the television last night, pictures from a helicopter. Brown water as far as you could see and just the roofs of houses sticking up out of it like turtle backs. I found my street by the church steeple. I think I found my roof. Mama would not look. She went in the back bedroom and shut the door and sang to herself.

The National Guard is at the bridge, and nobody can go in except the men in boats. Curtis drives out to the edge every morning anyhow and stands there with the other men. He says the water is going down, an inch or two a day. He says it like a man reading the numbers off a thermometer for a sick child.

School is still closed. I have had word from some of my families. Some are in shelters, some with kin in Wilson and Raleigh and as far as Maryland. One of my girls wrote me a letter in pencil on the back of a Red Cross form and her auntie mailed it to Gloria's. It says, "Mrs. Battle, I still have my library book. It got wet. I am sorry." Lord, baby. You do not owe anybody a thing.

Tuesday, September 21, 1999

We are nine people in Gloria and Ray's three-bedroom house. Mama has the sofa bed. Curtis and I have Gloria's sewing room, on an air mattress from the church. Gloria's side of Rocky Mount stayed dry, praise God, though other parts of this town are under too. Everybody knows somebody.

Everything I own right now fits in two grocery sacks and the trunk of the car. The church clothes closet gave me two skirts and some blouses. I went through the pile and found a navy blue suit my size and I stood there holding it and cried, not because I was sad but because some woman I will never know had given away her good suit.

Mama's pressure pills were in the kitchen cabinet. The drugstore here filled them for us without the bottle, but it was out of pocket, because Medicare does not pay for pills. Ray paid and would not hear another word about it.

Everything smells like river, even though we got out dry. It's in my hair. I think it is in my head.

Monday, September 20, 1999

The library here opened again today, and I signed up for my thirty minutes, and now I will try to put down what happened.

Wednesday it rained like the Lord had forgotten to turn it off. All day and all night, on ground that was already soaked from Dennis. By Thursday morning the storm was gone and the sun came out and people thought the worst was over. It was not. All that rain was still coming down the Tar River from up the country, and it kept rising all day.

Thursday evening the word went around that the river was going to come over the dike. The firemen went door to door. Curtis said, "We are going. Now." I took Mama, her pills from the bathroom (not the kitchen, I forgot the kitchen), the family Bible, the shoebox of pictures, and our insurance papers. That is all. I left my good dishes. I left twenty years of my students' letters in a box in the closet. When we pulled out, the water was already standing in the low end of the street.

We spent that night in a school gym in Tarboro with I do not know how many other people. Cots. Red Cross blankets. Babies crying all night. A man in the corner had a little radio playing gospel, low, and nobody asked him to turn it off. Mama slept sitting up in a folding chair because she said she wasn't getting on any cot at her age.

Friday morning the news came. The river had come over the dike in the night and the whole town was going under. People who stayed were being taken off roofs by boats and helicopters. We were among the lucky ones and I know it.

Saturday Ray found a way around on the back roads and brought us here. It took two hours to go what is usually twenty minutes.

My time is up. There is a man behind me trying to find out about FEMA.

Tuesday, September 14, 1999

They say Floyd is enormous, bigger than the whole state on the weather map. The whole coast is leaving. Today there were cars with Florida and South Carolina plates at every gas station in Tarboro, people who had been on the interstate since yesterday morning. A family from Charleston asked me directions to anywhere with a motel room. I did not know one.

The superintendent closed school for tomorrow. My children were jumping out of their seats. They think a hurricane is a holiday. I suppose I did too, at nine.

Curtis brought the porch chairs in and filled the bathtub and bought batteries. We are a hundred miles and more from the ocean. But the ground is still soaked from Dennis, and the river is still high, and I have lived by that river all my life. I am not afraid of the wind. I am thinking about the river.

Wednesday, September 8, 1999

Dennis finally wandered off. The river is high and brown and people drive out to the dike after supper to look at it, the way people used to go look at a fire.

Today I taught my Princeville lesson, which I do every September. How after the war, freed people gathered on the low ground across the river from Tarboro and stayed, and called it Freedom Hill. How they built houses and churches and a school there by the river, because that was the land they could get. How in 1885 they chartered the town and named it Princeville after Turner Prince, a carpenter. I tell the children it was the first town in America incorporated by Black people, and I watch the ones from Princeville sit up a little straighter. Every year. It never gets old.

A boy asked if the river ever comes in. I told him yes, it used to, before the dike, my mama remembers it. And he said, "But not anymore." And I said, "Not anymore."

Monday, August 30, 1999

Rain since last night, and they say Hurricane Dennis means to sit off the Outer Banks for days, like a guest who will not go home. The children are wild with it, second week of school, no recess. We made rain gauges out of two-liter bottles in science and they are all full.

Monday, August 16, 1999

Teacher workday, and I have my room ready early, so here I am on the computer in our school library, where my niece set this page up for me over the summer.

I am forty-five years old, and I have taught fourth grade in Tarboro for twenty-one of those years. I live across the Tar River in Princeville, in the house my mother was born in, with my husband Curtis and my mother, who is seventy-eight and runs the both of us. Our son is in the Army and our daughter is in college in Durham.

My niece says a journal on the Internet is for whatever I want. What I want is a place to write down the ordinary things, the children and the church and my town, because I have always believed ordinary things are worth writing down. Somebody should be keeping the record.